Plurk. The good, the bad, and the Shrek-style ugly…

Please note that if I singled out one of your plurks as an example of ‘bad Plurking etiquette’, I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just one of the things that I find really annoying/one of the plurks my anonymous researcher came across. However, if you do feel offended by anything in this post, feel free to block me/remove me from your friends list/write several plurks about what a mean bitch I am. If you’re that sort of a person, I wouldn’t want you in my friends list anyway.

Before we start, you should know that I like to keep my timeline interesting. Whether that involves getting song lyrics stuck into my head,sharing cool food combinations or repeatedly posting bad jokes, I’m all for it.

What I find irritating is people using Plurk as a replacement for IM. I find Plurk is a cross between a chatroom and a message board, but it doesn’t mean it has to be a place to act like you’re mid-conversation with people, and someone will care if you vanish. Neither is it your mental action planner. [@Copyrite's and @loquacious's words, because I was going to say something a lot more explicit.] :s_dance:

Here’s the deal. I don’t give a damn if you ‘BRB’, ‘BBL’ or ‘G2G’. If you’re going to vanish, at least do it in an interesting manner, and give details of where you’re going, or why. No, I don’t want to stalk you, but surely this plurk makes you want to reply more than this, this, this, this or this?
Also, while we’re at it, unless you’re gonna give us a webcam show of it, nobody wants to know you’re in the shower. -.- [Once again, @loquacious's words.]

If you are close enough to someone to care about when they come and go, there’s software for this sort of thing. It’s called MSN/AIM/YIM/IRC/Jabber/Google Talk/etc. You could also separate people the people who actually care out into cliques and private plurk them.

Learn how to use these options, instead of spamming up my timeline.

I’ve also learnt is that some teen plurkers can be really irritating. I know I wrote a blog post on Why Age Shouldn’t Matter a while ago, and I know I’m generalising now and completely contradicting everything I said in that blog post, but how can I (and other people) not, when we meet such idiots on the web? I see why people are reluctant to be friends with people of my age, because sadly, most of us are still immature dicks.

Some of the people I’ve ‘met’ – and you’ll know who you are – seem incapable of typing a sentence without tildes. Yeah, once in a while is OK, but would it kill to put a full stop? Can you not type the word ‘drama’ without it turning into ‘dramz ~’?
They also have this strange lovefest going on with things that they own/make. Whenever someone posts something that they’ve made, and ask for opinions, whatever they’ve made will never be 100% perfect. No one can do that. Instead of being given constructive criticsm, however, their plurks turn into an “OMGz, this is awesome!” and an “I love this so so so so so much!” thing.
When I, or another person, don’t say “this is amazing”, and actually give some suggestions as to how it could be improved, we get attacked, until I cease to care in the end. I know what I do isn’t perfect, and I’d love the chance to be able to improve. In the long run, I won’t learn with people blatantly lying to me about how good something is. These people rally around and attack someone who may have a different opinion to them, and it’s just disgustingly childish.

@loquacious would also like to add that another major annoyance about plurkers that gets her is the fact that some find it absolutely necessary to post lolcat pictures (not including the official icanhazcheeseburger account), xkcd and Kris Wilson comics, because, yanno, we couldn’t possibly ever type in the URL and check it out ourselves, could we? No, absolutely not. For God’s sake people, just stop spamming up our timelines with images we could see for ourselves if we wanted to, okay? It’s also a good idea to read a plurk properly before responding, because if you don’t, you end up looking stupid.

Last of all, what would a Plurk learning/ranting post be without a comment about karma? Some care about it, some don’t. For those that do care, however, please stop doing your stupid little karma maintenance plurks. Karma only goes down every 12 hours now anyway, so your plurks are pointless.

Before I go, please remember that I still love Plurk. It’s just some people that are making it hard for me to enjoy it as much as I used to. :s_annoyed:

Person: “Can you do me a massive favour and sign up for [blah] using my referral code?”
Me: “No.”
Person: “But it’s a [blah] website with [blah blah blahs]!”
Me: “Still a no.”
Person: *expletive*

However, being a natural sheep, I followed the tweeting crowd – or should that be baaing ‘herd’? – and signed up for Plurk. Baa.

I soon found out that Plurk was more interesting than it appeared to be. Almost everyone I was following on Twitter seemed to be signing up also, and I soon found myself in a little community of people, all getting used to this new website.
To be honest, I didn’t exactly warm to Plurk at first, muttering about its’ “fugly colour scheme” via Brightkite on Twitter – confused yet? I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, brown and blue will never go together, no matter how much you try and dress it up.

Anyway, long story short, I eventually grew to love it, ‘fugly colour scheme’ and all (probably because I changed it as soon as I could). I began plurking more and tweeting less, loving all the conversation a random plurk could manage to generate. One of the most important things I found, however, was the amount of new things I was involuntarily learning every day from plurkers. Like Twitter, plurkers shared links, but the fact that you could embed images and videos in plurks made me, a fickle person, feel more inclined to click them. Aside from the fact that I was getting Rickrolled more than ever *glares at @Tenebrous*, I learnt many useless useful things that will be embedded in my memory forever, courtesy of plurkers.

Without further ado, and because this introduction that was meant to be short but has dragged on for several paragraphs has gone on for long enough, here is the list, in no particular order, of everything Plurk has taught me in the last few months. Hopefully, I’ve remembered to credit everyone who helped me to learn something new, but if I haven’t, please leave me a comment!
[Note the thinly-veiled "ZOMG! I want comments!!!111!oneoneone!!"]

• One of the most important (and yet corny) things Plurk has taught me is that if I took the time to talk to my online acquaintances, I’d actually like them a lot! I’ve built better friendships with people I only knew vaguely before. – For example, hi @Lizziefrog! Lizzie‘s someone I’ve had in my Vox neighbourhood for ages, but I never really talked much to her before I got her addicted to Plurk. Yes, I know I’m a lazy person who really should try harder to maintain friendships.
• Another shocking discovery was that @Caledonia was/is human! Only kidding, Caledonia. @loquacious and I spent years before Plurk came along – she hosts me for free(!!) – thinking that she was way too intelligent to be human, and therefore had to be a bot (ah, tween thoughts). It’s a pleasant surprise indeed to find out she IS a real person, who hopefully won’t kill me after reading this! Feel free to go after @loquacious, though. I won’t stop you.
• I also learnt that things will spread like wildfire if you just plurk them. @doshdosh once asked people to replurk one of his plurks if you wanted new Plurk friends – try saying that in a hurry! – and I got wind of it. The next thing I know, I have about 500 Plurk friends.
  Another example of ‘Plurk power’ was me randomly making this image during the Gmail Fail and plurking it for the sake of Plurk. The next thing I knew, another plurker had found it, dugg it, and it suddenly had 30K views. Now, I don’t use Digg much, so basically, without Plurk, I wouldn’t have had my 5 seconds of internet fame.
• Plurk also helped me learn more about a very important food: bacon! A geek’s dream food, but I still managed to miss out on a large amount of bacon-related things… That was until I friended @erinsap, who showed me the ways of bacon. *bows down* However, one of the things I won’t forgive him for is for plurking a bacon-shaped object that suspiciously looked like a tampon. *twitches* That image will stay in my memory forever, and not in a good way.
  Among the other bacon related stuff I found through Plurk was bacon chocolate and bacon salt. I haven’t tried them yet, but methinks that my family would NOT appreciate it if I gave them bacon chocolate/bacon ice-cream/bacon custard/bacon smoothies/put bacon flavouring into every single thing they ate… It’s better off that I don’t try them. The temptation would be too great, especially with relatives I dislike (so, all of them, then).
  In short, bacon is AMAZING. And Plurk helped me rediscover my love for it.
• Oh, and this should’ve been obvious, but I’m too trusting for my own good. I learnt that I should never click links from anyone I trust (yes, trust), because they’ll probably rickroll me. *slaps @Tenebrous*
• The ‘me too’ syndrome is contagious. For example, if someone plurks about food, you’ll find you’re suddenly hungry, even if you just ate. I blame @Farho for most of this. If he hadn’t posted so many pictures of mangoes and other delicacies… *drools*
• One of the benefits of Plurk that I’ve found is ‘ask and ye shall receive’. I’ve found that if I ask a simple question, the Plurk community will respond, and help me with whatever my problem is. So far, I’ve had life-saving Science homework help from @maheshee11, a way to have page includes without PHP from @thetristan, general website and plugin advice from @Katharine and software suggestions from @dazzer67, @Kirako, @smashingred and @dropcase.
• Plurkers are some of the kindest people I’ve ever known. To quote @Cylithria, Plurk has shown me that ‘people still have hearts and not ALL of the world is cold and callous’. @Cylithria, incidentally, is amazing. I got a handwritten letter (!!) from her, but that’s another story…
• Finally, one of the most important things I’ve learnt is that no one should ask me to karma-sit for them (use @karma medic instead), because I’m lazy, and your karma will drop anyway. Also, I’ll add weird stuff to your account. @loquacious learnt the hard way when she went off to camp and came back to modifications of her page titles (“NOT Plurkalicious, Baby” and “I Suck Monkey” sound familiar?) and random plurks about stealing cookies.

Although this post has turned into an essay now (this is only Part 1!), you can see how much Plurk has influenced me these last few months. TRANSLATION: I spend way too much time on Plurk. There’s a lot more that Plurk has taught me, which I’ll write about in Part 2.

If you aren’t there already, what are you waiting for? JOIN ME! Btw, this post was not sponsored in any way. Not enough people read this little blog.